


Voices, Lost and Far Away

by ElegantPi



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Comment Fic, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-23
Updated: 2010-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElegantPi/pseuds/ElegantPi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth cannot come to terms with her exile from Atlantis or the silence in her apartment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Voices, Lost and Far Away

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Friendshipper's [Stargate Graduation Party](http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/245160.html), from a prompt by [Tielan](http://tielan.dreamwidth.org/): "Elizabeth - the voices in your head."

The silence in Elizabeth's apartment presses in on her, so she opens the windows. The night also is silent; once upon a time, what seems a very long time ago, she chose this apartment because of its quiet location. Tonight, she would be glad of a wind to stir the trees and make them rustle, or better yet a thunderstorm to shake her windows. Street noise, people noise, anything to break the silence that so pointedly reminds her of where she is not.

Curled up in the chair beside her window, Elizabeth shivers just a little in the late September air. She reaches down to pull a blanket off the floor, wraps it around herself and draws her knees up to her chest. Somewhere in the night, she hears the laughter of a girl and the patter of high heels on the sidewalk.

The phone rings. It's on the other side of the room, across a living room that she hasn't bothered to tidy up for a couple of days. _Must remember to throw out those take-out boxes_, she thinks, as the phone trills again. _They're starting to smell._ She turns her head to breathe in air from the window. It smells flat, lusterless, lacking the salty tang to which she has become accustomed. Moving to the sofa, she drags the blanket with her and curls up under it just as the answering machine picks up.

Her eyelids are heavy, so she closes them. It's so easy just to go to sleep these days. Too easy. But she has no reason to stay awake. No crisis to manage, no team to wait for in the control room, no new discoveries to sort through, and no corridors to wander at night nor balconies to haunt that overlook a city and an ocean beneath alien stars. And sometimes, she dreams...

"You've reached Dr. Elizabeth Weir. Please leave me a message and your contact information, and I will return your call as soon as I can." BEEP.

"Um... yes. Elizabeth, this is, um, Rodney... well, you know who I am. I don't really... I just wanted to see how you're doing. Call me sometime? Or, you know, email me, or something. You've got my contact info and all that. At least, I think you do. OK, well, hope to hear from you soon." BEEP.

Maybe it's Rodney's voice that does it, overlapping with those moments of transition between her brain's Alpha and Theta waves, drawing her back to Atlantis. As his voice fades away, it's replaced with the sussurration of ocean waves and the hum of a city alive.

And it's Rodney's voice she hears, on that first incredible day. _Oh. So the story of Atlantis is true. A great city that sank in the ocean._ Yes, Rodney, it is true.

Then other voices, one on top of the other, but she can pick them out - so familiar, echoing in every room, every corridor.  
John, jubilant. _I shot him! In the leg!_  
Carson. _I told you I was the wrong person!_  
Teyla's gentle voice. _We have always lived in the shadow of the Wraith..._ Teyla, oh, Teyla...  
Aidan - she can almost see him, too, grinning at her in his boyish way; he was so young! - _I could tell my grandma what I've been up to all this time._ Then, pleading, _...just let me prove it. Just give me something to do..._  
Ronon. Ronon rarely speaks, but she can sense him, a solid presence beneath the other voices.

Zelenka and Rodney, bantering, finishing each other's sentences. John's sarcastic interjections. Teyla, across the briefing room table, quirking a smile at her and rolling her eyes at "the boys". Ronon putting his boots up on the table - she knows he knows that it annoys her, and she's sure that's why he does it.

She can feel it coming back now, the familiar weight of responsibility for several hundred lives and perhaps the fate of a galaxy or two. The bustle of daily life and routine, the sharp surges of adrenaline when routine is interrupted. The hum of computers, the glow of an alien sun streaming through stained glass and pooling in colorful shapes on a silver-blue floor. And a different glow, white-hot, blue-tinged, rippling like water, sparking like lightning, tunneling through space and time. No mission reports describe the smell of a wormhole. It's like ozone, a scent like air before a summer storm.

And then another voice, fondly: _Look at you - always worrying. You put too much pressure on yourself._

_Not anymore_, Elizabeth thinks, wandering down a blue hallway, trailing her hand over the intricate copper decorations. Bright water reflections ripple over the walls. The swoosh of a door sliding closed, the hum of the environmental system, the waves rocking against the piers far below, the call of a sea bird. The salty wind on her face, tangling in her hair, and the smooth rail of her balcony under her hands. The smell of Athosian cooking drifting out from the mess hall. Home, oh, home - the voice of home, the scent, the sound of it.

Then: _Your guardianship of this city is no longer necessary. The city is now under my control._ The cruelty of the words knocks Elizabeth breathless, spoken as they are in such a mild, reasonable voice. She's falling, shattering, space and time coming apart at their infinite seams, and she gasps and drags herself upright, shaking that voice out of her head, denying those words, trying to save herself, hold herself together.

She's surprised to find herself standing up, hands outstretched, reaching. Blanket pooled around her feet, the lights of her apartment on and her window open to the night. It's all fading away, now. The voices of her people, her city, Ronon's fierce presence, Rodney's brash chatter, the lift of John's voice, and Teyla's persistent hope and determination. Gone, stolen, as lost to her now as any legendary lost city had ever been.

Her answering machine is flashing a number in the double digits. She passes it on the way to get a bottle of water from the fridge. She reaches out, and with a brush of her finger, deletes all messages.


End file.
